a wall of family photos and personal
mementoes (right) rises above Peter Davison’s
desk. A view of the living area (far right) from
the entry stair shows the indoor garden filled with
greenery. Farther back are numerous collections,
including a cluster of reeds picked by Joan Goody
at the couple’s weekend home in Gloucester,
Massachusetts. The bookcase is filled entirely
with books Davison published or edited.

crowded happily into an indoor garden.

The layout is uncluttered, as befits a loft
— there are almost no doors — but it’s subtle,
too. The kitchen, for instance, is divided from
the living room by a partition that’s just high
enough to keep the food mess out of sight, but
low enough to let the cook carry on a conversation with friends at the dinner table.

A spiral stair takes you to the third floor.Here are the bedroom and two studies. There’san open-air terrace with still more plants. “Joanloved the combination of indoor and outdoorspaces,” says her stepdaughter, Lesley Davison.“She was always talking about her porch inBrooklyn growing up.”It’s a very lived-in house, with tacked-upnotes, photos, and other memorabilia. The

walls and shelves are lined with artwork. On the
top-floor terrace, sculptor William Wainwright’s
glassy spheres refract the daylight into different
colors. Two textile works by Wainwright’s wife,
Clara, hang on another wall, both with personal
notes on their backs. There are paintings by notable artists — Gyorgy Kepes, Ben Shahn — but
most are by local artists who were also friends.

Goody and her husbands loved to collect things. There are reeds she harvested from
Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the couple
had a second home; matchbooks picked up
at foreign hotels and restaurants; arrows from
an African desert, courtesy of writer Elizabeth
Marshall Thomas, whose books Davison published; musical instruments, a special interest of